Insights from impacts of the digital divide on children in five majority world countries during the COVID-19 pandemic

Figures & data

Figure 1. Number of documents per year returned with the search key ‘digital divide’ by Scopus.

Table 1. Distributions of publications and internet speed by country.

Country	Publications ^a 1997–2021		Publications 2020–2021		Internet speed (mbps) and rank ^b (2020)
United States	2342	31.4%	331	28.1%	33.16 (23rd)
United Kingdom	728	9.8%	113	9.6%	27.13 (31st)
South Africa	244	3.3%	43	3.7%	8.24 (77th)
Brazil	92	1.2%	15	1.3%	7.7 (83rd)
Pakistan	46	0.6%	13	1.1%	1.33 (130th)
Turkey	46	0.6%	8	0.7%	7.1 (86th)
Kenya	22	0.3%	2	0.2%	3.29 (114th)

Note: ^a source: Scopus as of 4 September 2021; ^b source: https://fairinternetreport.com/research.

Table 2. Overview of the participants in the five MWCs.

Attributes	Brazil	Kenya	Pakistan	South Africa	Turkey
Recruitment	Local music school NGO	Church leaders	Local School	Community-based organisations	Municipal teaching institution
Children (8–10 years old)	8	4	9	7	8
Teens (13–17 years old)	7	7	10	7	6
Parents/Carers	6	7	12	10	8
Professionals	7 (5 teachers, 1 social worker, 1 researcher)	5 (church elder, teacher, counsellor, police officer, researcher)	9 (3 clinical psychologists, 3 educational psychologists, 3 counsellors)	7 (early childhood practitioners)	5 (1 clinical psychologist, 2 academic psychologist, 1 social worker, 1 teacher)

Figure 2. Workflow of the empirical activities (*CYP = Children & Young People).

Table 3. Description of the five-phase process.

	Duration	Activity	Rationale
Phase 1: CYP Diaries	1–2 weeks	Keep notes or drawings of what happens in everyday life during the pandemic; Bring the diary to the focus group to facilitate sharing and discussion.	Encourage CYP to reflect on their experiences and thus improve their understanding of the unusual situation
Phase 2: CYP Focus Groups 1	1 h discussion for Children and YP each	Discuss special things noted in the diary; Describe how things deemed important in the past changed during the pandemic; Share what was learnt from experiences in the pandemic to make one feel stronger in difficult situations in the future; Create a poster on what is discussed.	Engage CYP in collective sense-making of the current experiences, stimulating to co-construct aspirations for the post-pandemic future.
Phase 3: CYP Diaries + CYP-Elder Interviews	1–2 weeks; interviews of any length	Walk around the neighbourhood to note any important things; Interview a grandparent or an elder with whom one lives on past difficult situations; Identify an object that helped coping better.	Enable CYP to contextualise experiences in the broader socioecological context and learn from the elders’ usable past of coping with hardship.
Phase 4: CYP Focus Groups 2	1 h discussion for Children and YP each	Discuss special things noted in the diary and the object identified; Describe the usage of media and technology during the pandemic and comment on their helpfulness for coping; Create a poster on the post-pandemic future.	The same for Phase 2. Further, enable CYP to co-construct the understanding of inequalities in terms of the digital divide and identify ways to address the issues.
Phase 5: Adults Focus Groups	1 h discussion for Parent and Professional group each	Discuss impacts of the pandemic on children and supports provided, any regional differences; Identify what is important for making children feel stronger; helps from individual, family, community and country; Describe children’s usage of media and their helpfulness for coping.	Enable parents and professionals to reflect on the nature and extent of supports that children had for coping in the pandemic and identify ways to improve such supports in the future.

Table 4. The process of the qualitative data analysis.

Step	Activity	People
Data Preparation	Diary data: anonymise, digitalise and translate Focus group data: transcribe and anonymise Translate textual data into English	Local researchers in the five sites
Data Familiarisation	Present data summaries in team meetings (online) Read individual datasets	Core project team + Local researchers
Initial Codebooks	Compile CYP and PP data as two codebooks per site (i.e. 10 codebooks) Develop a common thematic structure with categories and sub-categories for both CYP and PP codebooks	Two social science researchers proposed the categories that were checked by the other team members
First Codebook Validation	Merge all five CYP codebooks into an integrated one Merge all five PP codebooks into an integrated one Check the relevance of data to the (sub)categories (offline) Discuss issues identified and amend accordingly (online)	Core project team split into two sub-groups with each checking one of the two integrated codebooks
Second Codebook Validation	Cross-check the two validated integrated codebooks Discuss issues identified and amend accordingly (online) Share the re-validated codebooks for comment (offline)	Two subgroups swapped the validated integrated codebooks for final checking
Codebook refinement	Select relevant categories to define fine-grained codes Apply the coding scheme to the subset of qualitative data Refine the codes iteratively till a good level of agreement reached	Lead researcher with specific expertise selected the relevant categories and analysed the data with a subgroup.

Figure 3. Categories and subcategories for the impact area Technology.

Figure B1. A drawing about the post-pandemic future in a child’s diary in Pakistan.

Figure B2. A drawing about the Zoom meeting in a child’s diary in Brazil.